Boosting Cell Phone Battery Life with Nanotube Wiring

Three bits of nanotube memory. The middle bit is “off,” while the other two are “on.”

There’s nothing more annoying than when you are running your favorite app your smart phone is begging you to feed it. The battery charge on a cellphone, especially smart phones, can last maybe a day if you’re lucky.

The biggest culprit responsible for draining battery life on mobile devices is accessing memory. Whenever you fire up memory intensive applications, it request an instruction exchange, whcih cost electricity.

What if after you charged your phone or laptop, you didn’t have to charge it for at least a month?

Researchers from the University of Illinois say they can boost the battery life of cellphones, laptops and other mobile electronics by a factor of 100 by converting wires inside memory chips into carbon nanotubes. These nanotubes consume a hundred times less power to transmit instructions to run applications.

It’s called “nanotube phase-change memory.”

No word when these memory chips will be sold commercially.

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